Windblown: 2024’s Latest Co-Op Treat

Co-op Roguelikes are my new Tetris 99.

Roguelikes, by design, want you to go again and again.

Add in friends, and you better believe I will.

Again, and again.

New build after new build. Failure after failure. Victory after victory.

This season’s co-op roguelike hotness is Windblown, a top-down action game made by Motion Twin starring anthropomorphic animals and lots and lots of build options.

It took me about 20 hours to feel like I had seen what Early Access had to offer, including a dozen different builds. Some rewarded safe and considered play. Others paid out when I charged forward with abandon. I’ve supported my allies and carried entire runs.

It takes all kinds to beat Windblown, but all kinds are available.

Gameplay: you’ve got two weapons, each mapped to a different button. The ranged beatbolt, for example, requires timed button presses to ensure critical damage. The heavy blade is a slow but powerful melee weapon. Kunai apply a Curse debuff that causes the team to do more damage, while the katar reward backstabs with Bleeding. Weapons are the cornerstone of many builds, but they aren’t just their standard attacks.

When you end a combo, a little prompt pops up for an Alterattack: a more powerful finishing move using the other weapon in your arsenal. So if you’ve done three perfect shots from your beatbolt, activating an alterattack will do a heavy slam with the heavy blade. And so on.

These alterattacks deal significant damage, but more importantly, they provide you with frames of invulnerability, making them the crux of defensive play. Well, in addition to your dashes and hard stuns or freezes.

You can also equip two trinkets, skills on cooldown that can do everything from spread debuffs to deal heavy damage. Finally, there’s your fish, which is on an even longer cooldown and can provide things like invulnerability to you and nearby allies or a bounce pad from which you can safely rain down damage on your enemies.

Of course, Windblown being a roguelike, how your passive Gifts come together is even more important. Just to give you an idea, some of the builds I used were:

• Debuff based. Using Kunai, which apply a stack of Curse on each attack (causing the target to make more damage for each attack taken) as my primary weapon and a Staff as my secondary (applying Burn—a basic damage over time debuff—with every finished combo or successful alterattack), I applied almost everything. My Gifts increased the maximum number of Burn stacks and their proficiency, while also reducing the damage my team took from Cursed enemies. With maxed-out attack speed, and my partner’s endless stacks of Bleeding (causing every hit to deal bonus damage per stack), I was dealing really rapid instances of small numbers, and very, very safely.

• Centered around Echo, which deals 105% more damage a second after my attack lands, rewarding big, singular numbers with bigger results. Instead of spamming the attack button as much as possible, I relied on focused alterattacks from the heavy blade (that aforementioned slam). Also effective: the Bomb trinket skill, which dealt huge damage in an AOE. And then an even BIGGER damage Echo. Any boosts went to Critical Damage once I got a Gift that made it so Echoes could crit (as well as a Gift that made my Echoes deal AOE damage), and with a weapon that caused me to do 120% more critical damage (at the cost of some regular damage, which I didn’t use anyway), I was chunking the bosses for thousands of damage.

• All about scythes, which dealt damage as they circled my character and required no effort on my part beyond staying close to my foes and improving their uptime. I had trinkets that spawned scythes, Gifts that improved their size and damage, and made me spawn even more scythes by doing certain damage values, and life steal. While my rotating scythes tore through my enemies, I basically could not be killed faster than I could heal.

I’ve had builds focused on alterattacks, builds that focused on my weapons, and more. I haven’t tried it yet, but one of my brothers swears by a build based on Rush attacks.

Okay, I admit that may be nothing more than a smattering of words to someone who hasn’t played, but the point is this: there are a lot of fun builds in Windblown, and whether I’m building to survive, to deal damage, or to increase the potency of my allies, each and every way was fun.

If I want to give up damage to be an unkillable tank, I can.

Well, with one (major) caveat:

You see, Windblown has a Sudden Death feature (which the Devs ARE changing; remember, Early Access). If one player dies—say, the guy who has been forgoing health upgrades for trinket cooldowns—then everybody else in the game will enter a state of Sudden Death. In Sudden Death, everybody dies in one hit.

It doesn’t matter how much health you have, or how much lifesteal, or how much damage your foe deals, you will die in one shot.

As it stands, it’s an incredibly frustrating feature. Players who have built around survival can find themselves punished in an instant, rendering their build useless. Sudden Death can be undone, but it requires killing ten enemies.

Simple, in the early game, when little robots can be squashed just by dashing over them, and when enemies can be cut down in good time. But it becomes more aggravating in the late game, when bosses have more health and even regular enemies become damage sponges. Intended to make comebacks thrilling and increase the challenge, Sudden Death really just punishes players in a way that isn’t fun.

Again, Sudden Death is (mostly) going away. It remains to be seen what its replacement looks like, because it will have a replacement, but for now, it can feel more than a little overbearing.

Another point worth mentioning is that the randomness of runs doesn’t always let builds come together. Sometimes, too many Gifts drop, but not enough Gift Slots (which allow you to increase the number of passives you can equip), effectively making each Gift worthless. Missing pieces to powerful builds come and go because Gift Slots remained elusive.

Other times, we’d have plenty of slots, but not enough Gifts. Sometimes we’d have to finish out runs with low-level weapons because the last chests all dropped Cogs (a resource used for persistent upgrades). Boosts might not offer as many chances to increase max health—a real problem when late-game enemies can deal over a hundred damage per hit.

This isn’t uncommon in roguelikes. Builds are always at the whims of good fortune. And Windblown does have things like rerolls that allow you to try and hone in on the build of your dreams.

But it would be nice if there was greater consistency in the types of drops that showed up so that we would be hamstrung by our skill and overconfidence, not the availability of Gift Slots.

Early Access has meaning to a game like Windblown, which is made by the development studio behind roguelike behemoth Dead Cells. Assuming it doesn’t implode outright, Windblown will receive updates that smooth the rough edges. Sudden Death will be addressed. Countless new builds will come into being. New stages, weapons, biomes, enemies, and more will be added. Bugs will be sprayed.

Etc. and etc.

Of course, none of that is technically guaranteed, but I’m confident, based on Dead Cells’ longevity, that good things will come to Windblown.

And even if nothing else is added; even if Sudden Death remains a punishing threat; and even if not every run gets to come together in a meaningful way, Windblown is already a fun, fast, and frenetic co-op roguelike.

It’s more than just its combat, of course. There’s a home base with a few secrets to discover, and persistent upgrades to buy. There’s even a shop where you buy new Gifts and Weapons so that they’ll drop in future runs (and when you do buy them, they’ll be immediately available to pick up for your next run!) (By only buying Gifts when I’m ready to use them, I’ve started runs with practically full builds. A nice way to not have to rely on luck!).

There are also little nooks and crannies in every biome that hide extra chests and upgrades, rewarding exploration.

And I should mention the dash, which has effectively no cooldown when you’re jumping across islands, getting you quickly from encounter to encounter.

But I digress. Windblown is great, and if you’re looking for something to play with your friends online during this holiday season, I highly recommend it.